The year was 2012, and I had a first draft of a book called “Not Another Angsty Teenage Vampire Story (Working Title)” simmering like nopales on the back burner, just waiting for me to put them into something good! I found NaNoWriMo and thought it would be the perfect chance to force a revision of this book I hated. So I dove in and rewrote the whole thing from page one, finishing at 104% of the word goal.

And this book, upon review, was to become my second trunk novel.

Yep. But, having learned from the experience, I decided I could fix my mistakes. Over the next decade I would change every character, combined several side characters, delete existing characters, reworked the plot, rework the world building. I kept patching, deleting, and evolving the book and no less than seven 90,000+ word, permutations of that first attempt at a satirical take on the Vampire books of the time I had reached something I wouldn’t feel the need to keep re-writing.

As my editor worked on the book, I turned my attention to outlining the second novel. I’d learned quite a bit, having re-written the same book over ten years. I was determined not to fall into those traps again.

I was in the middle of a revision of my, future, debut novel and was encouraged by my editor to do NaNoWriMo again because I had been outlining the second novel for some time now. I was never quite satisfied with it, rewriting the outline in different formats, determined not to spend years re-writing a book. But it seems I was willing to spend years working on an outline.

Thus, beings my challenge to do a 50,000-word first draft of my (future) follow-up novel.

I have learned a lot in 12 years, and I’m curious to see how this goes. If anything, I doubt the final draft will go through a decade of revision hell. I’ve been running out of things to learn, so it’s time to just do.